About the project

An open-source toolkit guided by the needs of Oxford scholars

The Digital Manuscripts Toolkit is a collaboration between scholars, developers and librarians, with the aim of making the International Image Interoperability Framework more accessible to a wide range of users. The Bodleian Libraries and the Mellon Foundation envisioned a set of tools that would enable small libraries with minimal IT support to build IIIF resources from start to finish, allow other IIIF users to pick and choose which tools fit their needs, and expose the flexibility and research potential of IIIF manifests to non-technical users.

The scholarly projects

In order to guide the development of the tools, the Bodleian solicited research proposals from Oxford academics that would utilize and challenge the capacities of IIIF. Small grants for research and digitization were awarded for four projects:

The technical requirements of these projects shaped the specifications of the toolkit, and Bodleian staff worked with the scholars to make innovative use of IIIF in digitizing the subjects of their research (for example, digitally stitching together a scroll that had been bound into a codex).